Saturday, March 22, 2014

More Demon photoshoots! Hellgirl and an Oonari Demon.

I came to the conclusion this week I’ve been spreading
myself a little thin lately, juggling way too much. It’s not a matter of “oh,
you should hire help” either, I’ve heard that before and if I did I’d only end
up working to pay someone with nothing to show and then just having to work all
that harder still, so that’s a shit idea.

Just seemed a massive convergence of bad coincidences that sent a few things sideways on me too. That and the “shortage” of foam
latex and some other essential supplies as lead me to the conclusion, I need to
take a break from work. I haven’t been working to exhaustion or anything, just
too many things at once that’s caused me to lose sight of some important
details.

One major oversight was on one of the two photo shoots I had
this week, both of which actually turned out really well considering how badly
I almost botched one of them.

The first shoot was Hellgirl. I never got a chance for a
proper shoot while we were at Hal-Con and I didn’t want to wait until summer,
so I asked an acquaintance if we could his greenscreen studio for the shoot. I
only got a handful of pictures, but they looked awesome.

Here’s a few of them.

The close up pictures came out much better, the red makeup just didn't take in the wider shots - it looked blurry even when it wasn't. I should've realized that was a possibility, red is a hard colour to shoot with either video or stills. In any case, I'm happy with how the few turned out.

And if this is the first time you're seeing or hearing of this shoot and you're inclined to send me a message telling me I got the big stone fist on the wrong side - this isn't a genderswapped version of Hellboy, this is a totally different character, so instead of the Right Hand of Doom, she's the Left Hand of Destruction. I came up with a whole backstory to her as well.

The second shoot was of an Oonari Demon – who are a less
volatile version of Succubi. So it was another “sexy demon” kind of shoot.
They’re simple and fun to do sometimes and while they haven’t yet generated as
much interested as I’d hoped, they have generated some.

This is the shoot I almost totally screwed up. The idea was
to have some 8 inch horns on a small-ish forehead piece. I was so pre-occupied
with trying to get 3 separate orders done with only a little foam latex left I
only turned out one piece and wasn’t able to test it to make sure it would work
and I had no backup planned prepared either

The makeup turned out great and then when it came time for
the horns, they pretty much fell off they were so heavy. Not that heavy, only
35 grams or something like that, but given the length of them they just didn’t
have enough support. If I’d been at home I might been able to whip something
up, but I was on location, half an hour from home, the model, Julie was already
all done up so I did the only thing I could think of and just decided on CG
horns

This is yet another reason I should never be on FaceOff, I’m
partially lazy with a reliance on photoshop. I don’t think Glenn would buy it
if I told him it’d be a partially CG character and he’d have to just imagine
the rest – although that is a more realistic scenario these days

Anyhow, the shoot went great for as simple as it was and I
ended up with some of the best shots I think I’ve ever taken so far.

So there you go, a couple more Demon photo shoots down. I
have a couple more lined up over the next few months, some fairly simple and I’ll be
taking my time on the more elaborate ones.
Got a new prop I’m hoping to start working on soon too, I’ll be
documenting the whole process once it’s done. Should be a pretty awesome piece
– something I’ve been wanting to do for ages as well.